When studio art professor Ryan Claytor started studying for his master’s degree in art at San Diego State University, he was worried his preferred field — drawing comics —would not be considered artistic enough for graduate school professors. For his first semester, he pursued his lesser artistic interests, though he carried around a sketchbook to keep his cartooning skills fresh in his spare time. That sketchbook caught the eye of a professor.

Professors would look over his shoulder, catch a glimpse of the sketchbook and ask him if he wanted to pursue comics.

“So I would tell them about it, and they’d say, ‘Is this what you want to do?’ I’m like, ‘yeah.’ ‘Well, why aren’t you doing it?’ ‘Because I’m an idiot,’” Claytor said. “I was, in retrospect, and if I could give myself any piece of advice, or an incoming student, is to do what you’re interested in doing.”

Claytor eventually switched over, studying comics for the rest of his graduate school career. He now teaches MSU students about comics as a subset of the studio art department of the Department of Art — Art History and Design.

Claytor teaches two comics classes, oversees a comics minor that is new for the 2016-17 academic year and is director of MSU’s annual comics conference, the MSU Comics Forum.

When Claytor arrived at MSU in spring 2009, he was teaching a brand new comics course and the Comics Forum was a much smaller-scale event than it is now, featuring just a few artists and a single keynote speaker.

In the years following, the academic pursuit of comics expanded. Claytor now teaches fundamental and intermediate comics courses in the studio art department and he has now teamed up with the Department of English to offer a comics minor.

The English department has run comics-based courses for years, graduate student Zack Kruse said. This spring, for example, graduate student Dave Watson is teaching a course on the Batman and Superman characters. Watson said student responses to the course have been positive so far.

“I generally expect, when I introduce people to a syllabus — particularly a syllabus in genre literature — that you’re going to lose a couple students from when class starts to when class begins,” Watson said. “That hasn’t been the case with this class, we’ve picked up a couple students as the class has gone on.”

In comics classes in the Department of English, readers must also have an artist’s eye for the visual side of the format, Kruse said.

“Comics are a visual narrative,” Kruse said. “The stories are told, you know, through cartoon art, right? With that in mind, we have sort of an extra layer that we have to sort of pick apart and think about ... the choices that the artist is making to push the narrative forward. We can’t solely rely on the writer’s dialogue.”

Along with coordinating the comics minor with the department, Claytor has also overseen the expansion of the Comics Forum since he became its director in 2010. The Comics Forum has expanded to include three dozen artists from around the world and added a second speaker from the world of comics. This year’s Comics Forum will be mostly held on Feb. 24-25, with a few events taking place in the week preceding and the week following.

Claytor said he aims to differentiate the Comics Forum from other comic conventions because it does not include any of the “peripherally-related things” that usually come with such conventions. He said the forum is based on showcasing the work of artists who are given the opportunity to present and sell their work for free, as long as it is pre-screened.

The forum also gives comic experts a no-frills forum to speak. This year, comic scholar Charles Hatfield and award-winning artist James Sturm will be keynote speakers.

The event will also include four panel discussions featuring comic scholars.

Claytor said he thinks the expansion in comics courses at MSU has coincided with a greater cultural acceptance of comics as a medium.

“I kind of feel like the comics medium is starting to come to a place where people understand that it’s more than capes and tights, it’s more than funny animals, it’s more than movie conversions of books,” Claytor said.